Benjamin > Benjamin's Quotes

“We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.”
― Harold Bloom

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.”
― Thomas Pynchon

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Why should things be easy to understand?”
― Thomas Pynchon

“Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.”
― Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

“You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.”
― Sacha Guitry